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It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?

Yeah, so my name is Barbara Elias.

I am the Sarah and James Bowden,

Associate Professor of Government and Legal Studies

at Bowden College.

I have also spent a good deal of time at the National Security

Archive which is a nonprofit associated with GW University where I ran their

declassification program on U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

And I've been a professor now for 10 years.

I specialize in proxy wars I guess although that's a term I don't like

as we'll talk about probably but I focus on security studies on alliances and especially on asymmetric alliances, especially when you have one very wealthy patron and a much more resource deficient local partner.

What draws someone to work on the mass

declassification of Afghanistan reports?

How do you get drawn into that word?

I think that it takes a good deal of obsession with how bureaucracy shapes foreign policy.

I have an insatiable curiosity about how institutional process

affects policy outcomes, often in unexpected ways, I think, when you don't see how the,

everything that goes into the soup, it doesn't seem to make any sense.

But then it really does take a close view

at what are different institutional pressures

that people are responding to within organizations

...